


i am a monster (is this what it feels like to be a man)

by rhllors



Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Historical Illusions, Post Series, Pre series, mention of canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 11:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhllors/pseuds/rhllors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>August, 1485. One King dies, another replaces him. This doesn't mean anything to an illiterate prostitute who slips a son out that evening in Cheapside, London. The woman and her midwife name him Harry, after their new King, and tell him one day he will be a Lord.</p><p>(Or, Five Lessons Hal Learns in Leadership. 1485-2013)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i am a monster (is this what it feels like to be a man)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bravofiftyone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bravofiftyone/gifts).



> Trigger warnings: vague illusion to blood, war, murder, incest, general violence. Nothing too explicit. Illusions and quotes are listed at the end notes.
> 
> Yuletide time once again! I really enjoyed getting my teeth (excuse the pun) back into Being Human, especially after having not really thought about it for months. Hope you enjoy!
> 
>  _Beneath every history, another history._  
>  \- Hilary Mantel, 'Wolf Hall'

Hal avoids London, like most vampires. For most, it's too big; the sprawling metropolis is easy to get lost in, but close knit communities that used to flourish mean it's very difficult to slip in and out--the only time it was ever popular, per say, for the supernatural was during World War II, when Blitzkrieg meant it was easy to pick off the weakest. Moreover, a bloody murder or a corpse in London is a national curiosity, with newspapers and headlines, intrigue, the works. Many prefer the beta cities: Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham. Easy to snatch.

Unlike most vampires, however, Hal avoids London for completely different reasons.

 

 

 

 

It's 1485. In a bright summer morning, Richard III cries something out as he dies--a clever man, a very clever man, much later will claim it was _My horse! My horse! My kingdom for a horse!_. More likely, it was something along the lines of _Fuck, fuck, fuck_ , before life evacuates. Henry Tudor becomes Henry VII, the course of history changes.

This doesn't mean anything to an illiterate prostitute who slips a son out that evening in Cheapside, London. The woman and her midwife name him Harry, after their new King, and tell him one day he will be a Lord.

The room next door thuds with the groans of sex. This is Harry's first lesson of leading: no one gives a shit, unless you make them.

 

 

 

 

Harry and the blacksmith's boy race through the streets as if the devil himself chases them, whooping, cutting past the everyday hubbub of London. They know which cracked puddles to leap over, which side-streets to ease their way through, which gentleman to make a very present effort not to run into. They dream of riding into battle, swords held high, shields painted a proper English red--usually slaying the French, of course. The date reads 1497, and now their enemy is the Cornish.

They are twelve years old but already loiter around the inns, looking to steal a few farthings off some rich lord in a poor disguise, or to pick up some scraps of food. Talk is now of defending the city from the barbarians from the South; who, according, to John Staff, who knows a man who knew a Cornishman's wife, are pushing through the country at such a pace, giants and all manner of unnatural creature accompanying them. The men in the tavern spit and fondle their weapons; one man says they are led by the true king, Richard of York, but no one cares that much--it all sound the same to Harry, who sometimes gets his King Harrys and King Richards mixed up in his head. Another man says that the Queen and her sons have been locked into the Tower, for their own protection. Dolly, who owns the tavern, swears to break every bottle in her tavern over the heads of giants before they come into her inn. This resounds a cheer that seems to shake the building to its foundations. These are men that murder, thieve and brawl, but today they decide to defend the Queen and her sons until their last living breaths.

(Can they name all of Henry Tudor's children? Possibly. Most likely not.)

Here, Harry learns his second lesson of leadership. It's easier to fight an unnamed, unknowable enemy.

(Hal knows, six hundred years later, that the Cornish only ever got as far as Taunton. London unites in defence, just as it will one hundred and fifty years later when they block Charles Stuart from entering their city.)

 

 

 

 

The third lesson is learnt at twenty four, when Harry tears the throat out of the man who kills the last of prostitutes who raised him with his own teeth.

(Don't get ahead of yourself yet: he's not a vampire, not yet.)

(Nina Pickering hisses to John Mitchell: _I think there's a poison in you which has nothing to do with being a vampire. I think you do enjoy it_.

She's right, of course. Nina has that astonishing ability.)

 

 

 

 

Harry flees, with a noose with his name on it waiting for him in London. He drifts through Europe, surviving as a mercenary. His thick accent which practically smells of the River Thames because it's so _London_ reveals him as an Englishman, which does him well--the English have a reputation on the continent, and it's not for being nice. _Drinkers, brawlers, murderers, the lot of them_ , a particularly stuck up Flemish archer says loudly in French in Worms, with a smile full of rotten teeth. When Harry stays engrossed in his watered down ale, he and his ilk laugh harder at the stupidity of the oik. Then Harry smiles back, something that promises bloody murder, and throws his dagger into the Dutchman's neck, his laugh now bubbling with blood. He then replies back in the only Flemish he knows-- _which one of you cunts wishes to join him?_ and once greeted with silence, returns to his ale.

The thing about being a mercenary in the sixteenth century is that you're very unlikely to be out of work for very long. The French fight the English, the English fight the Scots, the Italians can't stop fighting themselves; and most importantly, for Harry, the Poles & the Lithuanians fight the Muscovites. This brings him to the bloody forests of Orsha, and to a military doctor who likes to offer the wounded something closer to damnation than salvation.

It's funny how Harry's life bought him to this moment. Harry dies that day; for a country he's never been to, for a cause he in unaware of, for golden coins he'll never receive. No one mourns his disappearance (his friend the blacksmith's boy moved onto Italy, and brighter things), no one takes much care for the never recovered body of the Englishman who snarled swear words in more languages than countries most people had ever heard of.

Harry dies. The man who will be Hal is born, drenched in his own blood.

(The fourth rule: sometimes people will die. Sometimes they will be reborn. The desperate will do anything.)

 

 

 

 

The fifth rule is something that takes Hal six hundred years to learn. He sees the rise and fall of Empires, dynasties created and destroyed, war after war after war ravaging the land beyond repair. A Borgia Pope supposedly fucks his own daughter, a Hungarian woman bathes in the blood of virgins to find immorality, a war that is supposed to end all all wars leads to another, thirty years later. Levellers, Jacobins, Spartacists, Bolsheviks, Maoists, Blairites; you name it, Hal has seen it (and probably eaten it). He sees the scum of humanity, the seedy underbellies, decaying streets, slums that look like crows-nests. He believes he has seen the true face of mankind, and that it is _ugly_. Rotten, festering. A open wound, gushing out all things foul.

He changes, constantly. Good Hal, Bad Hal, the one who lines his dominoes up in perfectly symmetrical mazes, vast in their length, and the man who has a penchant for anyone with a pretty look about them. Lord Hal is a long way from Harry from Cheapside--amazing, really, how the vampires esteem him as royalty when he doesn't even know which of his possible mother's clients his father was. Everything about Lord Hal is a construction (a red shield, indeed), in the same way that every part of Good Hal is a construction. There's an irony in there, somewhere, under all that blood.

It's not until they've hoovered Cutler out of the carpet, packed away all of Eve's toys and Annie's photographs, cleared away the plastic sheeting and paid the bill before deciding that this time, they _really_ are going to kill the bloody fucking devil, does Hal realise something. His world is a structured reality, created by the world's most popular personification of raw evil, and they're going to tear it down. Similarly, every man he's ever made himself is a construction. It doesn't mean anything at all.

 

 

 

 

( _"...he desire to be human is the end, not the beginning. To want it is to have it. You're not wasting your time Tom, you've already won."_ )

 

 

 

 

That third lesson is the same as the fifth is, but incase you missed it: everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

 

 

 

 

(Hal avoids London because it's seen his real face. It's not Bad Hal, Good Hal, or any intermediary. It's the boy who whooped, trying to beat that blacksmith's boy, cheeks flushed with life and blood (his own blood), laughter echoing in his eyes and mouth. It's not until they crash out of the Devil's reality does he suggest that they try Cheapside.)

**Author's Note:**

> \- "My horse! My horse! My kingdom for a horse!" - William Shakespeare, Richard III: Act V, Scene IV  
> \- References to Dolly and John Staff are 'inspired' by John Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet from Henry IV, I & II (Shakespeare)  
> \- The Blacksmith's boy is Thomas Cromwell, who was the son of Walter Cromwell, became an mercenary in Europe, the protege of Cardinal Wolsey and ultimately Henry VIII's right-hand man. He was executed in 1540.  
> \- "Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are." - Machiavelli, "The Prince"
> 
> Episode quotes are from 3x5 - 'The Longest Day' and 5x6 - 'The Last Broadcast'.


End file.
